t was an obvious step to improve upon the
natural conditions by artificial means; dykes, and canals, and
flood-gates, with other hydraulic apparatus, would, even in the
beginning of society, unavoidably be suggested, that in one locality the
water might be detained longer; in another, shut off when there was
danger of excess; in another, more abundantly introduced.

[Sidenote: Control of agriculture by the government.]

There followed, as a consequence of this condition of things, the
establishment of a strong government, having a direct control over the
agriculture of the state by undertaking and supporting these artificial
improvements, and sustaining itself by a tax cheerfully paid, and
regulated in amount by the quantity of water supplied from the river to
each estate. Such, indeed, was the fundamental political system of the
country. The first king of the old empire undertook to turn the river
into a new channel he made for it, a task which might seem to demand
very able engineering, and actually accomplished it. It is more than
five thousand years since Menes lived. There must have preceded his
times many centuries, during which knowledge and skill had been
increasing, before such a work could even have been contemplated.

[Sidenote: Topographical changes occasioned by the Nile.]

I shall not indulge in any imaginary description of the manner in which,
under such favourable circumstances, the powers of the human mind were
developed and civilization arose. In inaccessible security, the
inhabitants of this valley were protected on the west by a burning sandy
desert, on the east by the Red Sea. Nor shall I say anything more of
those remote geological times when the newly-made river first flowed
over a rocky and barren desert on its way to the Mediterranean Sea; nor
how, in the course of ages, it had by degrees laid down a fertile
stratum, embanking itself in the rich soil it had borne from the
tropical mountains. Yet it is none the less true that such was the slow
construction of Egypt as a habitable country; such were the gradual
steps by which it was fitted to become the seat of man. The pulse of its
life-giving artery makes but one beat in a year; what, then, are a few
hundreds of centuries in such a process?

[Sidenote: The inundations lead to the study of astronomy.]

The Egyptians had, at an early period, observed that the rising of the
Nile coincided with the heliacal rising of Sirius, the Dog-star, and